IN THE SHADOWS
02-03-2008, 08:50 AM
It was a pretty slow night at dispatch not long ago when I got an alarm of a distribution breaker trip and reclose at about 2100hrs This particular breaker had about 2200 customers on it. Generally when this happens I start getting trouble reports coming in...the usual stuff like no powers, or car hit pole, or line down etc etc. This night though nothing came in. Finally after about 10 - 15 minutes I was about to clear the alarm, one single report comes in on the trouble screen. The lady customers comments stated " I turned on my front porch light and all the power went off in the neighborhood" I couldnt resist. I called the lady and identified myself as a dispatcher for XXX Power and I was very concerned about what size light bulb she had installed on her front porch? There was a long pause on the other end ( as I was biten myself to keep from laughing) when she said yea I walked out to my front porch, turned the porchlght on, and all the power went out,,,,then about 10 seconds later, I went back in the house turned the porchlight switch off... all the power in this part of town came back on! (The circuit breaker at the sub did have a 10 second delay on final reclose before lock-out ) Perfect timing. I fnally started cracking up and explained to her that it most likely wasnt her porchlight that caused the outage, just coincidental and thanked her for the good laugh at the dispatch center. We all appreciated her making our night for us. She laughed and admitted she was so embarrassed by making the call,,,then added, " well you know I had to try it again!"